User:Joel Janin

A student in solid state physics at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, who in 1964 joined Cy Levinthal at MIT (Cambridge, MA) to learn molecular biology, and returned to France (Gif-sur-Yvette and the Pasteur Institute) a year after to do a Ph.D. in Enzymology with Georges Cohen (Université de Paris, 1969). Has been with protein studies ever since. Was introduced to crystallography and the field of protein-protein interaction (PPI) during a post-doc with David Blow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK) in 1973-74. PPI modeling studies, new at the time, were developed in the following years at the Pasteur Institute in collaboration with Cyrus Chothia and Shoshana Wodak.

Became Professor of Biophysics in Université Paris-Sud, Orsay in 1981; taught undergraduate biochemistry and structural biolgy, and managed the graduate program in enzymology there. Started protein crystallography in Orsay, and continued in neighboring campus of Gif-sur-Yvette as the head of the CNRS Laboratoire de Biochimie et Enzymologie Structurales (1992-2005); performed structure-based studies of the catalytic mechanism of xylose isomerase and nucleoside diphosphate kinase; initiated structural genomics in Orsay en 2000 (http://genomics.eu.org/spip/). Returned to modeling PPI during a sabbatical year in Cambridge, UK (1998), and has been active in that field since then,for instance by managing the CAPRI (Critical Assessment of PRedicted INteractions, http://capri.ebi.ac.uk) experiment.

Presently Emeritus Professsor of Biophysics at the Yeast Structural Genomics Laboratory,Université Paris-Sud, Orsay. Author of two textbooks (in French) and over 180 publications listed in MedLine.